Conditional Love

My grandmother grew up as the 2nd daughter of a 3rd wife, within a large wealthy family where she was neglected. From the way she blindly favored her one son over the other, one could easily guess that she probably suffered similar treatment herself and subconsciously came to treat her own as differently as her family treated her.

While my grandmother completed high school at a time when most women in China could not read or write, she never matched up in the eyes of her family to her prettier and smarter older sister, who had the opportunity to complete college, marry an educated man, and live the modern life.

Instead, my grandmother married a Communist foot soldier and settled in a small town in Western China. To the outside world, my grandmother is the definition of grace and modesty, but as many quintessential Chinese woman of the traditional world, she grew up without a sense of empowerment, was never taught to have self worth, and worst of all, without an understanding that respecting others starts with respecting the self.

She is great at putting on a show, but it took me 24 years to realize that deep down, there is nothing there. I learned recently that she was not on speaking terms with my grandfather around the time of his death, some 25 years ago. She was not loved by her parents, and now I have come to learn that she was not loved by her husband either. “The perfect relationship between husband and wife should be one based on mutual respect and harmony at all cost.”

“Harmony at all cost” – it is her way of covering up anything that might be wrong. It is also a phrase my father has repeatedly said to me during the most frustrating and depressing years of my life.

For a person who was not loved by anyone, how can she then in turn love anyone else, including her own children?

It took me 24 years to figure her out, and figuring her out has in some ways set me free. She has haunted my father into the man who despite all his good heart, has emotionally abused me for 8 years we lived with my grandmother close by. Figuring her out made me realize why she has torn apart marriages of her own daughter, why her lack of independent thinking ironically matches with her calculating outbursts of anger. She knows when to use the vulnerable, when to hurt the vulnerable, when to be ruthless, and when to suck up, as others have done to her and around her back in the days.

I see in my grandmother, a tragedy. And in her son, my father, regret of not being able to overcome a tragic upbringing and all the flaws and fears associated with it. And I sincerely hope that I can be courageous enough to obtain the will to overcome the hereditary tendencies of repeating their mistakes.

Love withdrawal – it’s a psychiatric term I learned in college, utilized by those that practice conditional love as a way to get what they want. My grandmother is a pro, my father has inadvertently practiced it all his life without any understanding of what he is actually committing, and while I try not to repeat their mistakes, I look back in my short life and have already seen it happening in many situations of pressure and distress. We are all trying to not repeat the flaws of our parents, I am doing my best to avoid mine.

Once I get over the hate, I feel sorry for my grandmother, a woman who has never experienced unconditional love and thus does not know how to love others. And I am thankful that I was brought up instead by a different grandmother, one who has taught me how to pour all the love you have onto someone else, and realize that when you have poured all the love you could possibly pour, it all comes back, and that is what family is all about.

How to become a citizen of the world

I was raised in the early 90s, a time when every morning after our second period class, a obnoxiously loud speaker would come on and a squeaky womanly voice would scream that Chairman Mao wants us to conduct eye exercises for the glorification of the People’s Republic of China.

My dad is a card-carrying member of the Communist Party. Though, being a Communist in China those days is like being admitted into Boy Scouts, an honor for good boys who listen to their mama. When the immigration officer at the US embassy asked my dad if he is a card-carrying member of the Communist Party, my dad said “no” and that’s really how I was able to grow up in Texas after all.

For awhile when I was in high school an FBI agent followed my dad and asked him out to dinner in Burger King several times to “talk”. The talk was just routine inspections since we came from a region in China of 50% Muslims, but the real point here is you’d think the FBI would invite my dad to a nicer restaurant. One day the FBI agent called our house and my dad was away getting his gall bladder removed at the hospital. I told the FBI agent exactly that, and the agent never called us again.

The experience did affect my father. He started to suspect that our house was being watched and wire tapped. He started to tell me that I should stop discussing my radical liberal ideologies because they can all hear and they are going to get me in trouble. My dad also wanted me to swear that I won’t run off and become a spy no matter how enticing the money may seem, from either the US or from China. In turn, I began to believe that governments are not to be trusted, not only because governments lie, but also because your allegiance could change according to circumstances in life you cannot control, and governments are like egotistical men – they hate the uncommitted.

I was on track to become a proud citizen of China, then I moved to a country I absolutely hated but had to learn to live in. Somewhere in that process I fell in love with the complexities of my new country despite the country never completely accepting me back. For a long time I was not ready to accept the fact that I am really a citizen of nowhere, a citizen of everywhere. I am reluctant to accept because I believe identities are crucial. We must and should be able to define who we are despite ambiguities, for human beings are nothing without roots and cultures and a sense of where we belong. And history has shown repeatedly that those who really know themselves end up excelling in life.

Barack Obama inspired me because he was the first famous person anywhere who lived in a foreign land to openly talk about the complexities of that experience. He taught me that the end result of this radical struggle to define who you are is not to obtain a precise definition of who you are (you never will.) But rather, it is to obtain confidence in knowing what your values are, values deeply rooted in your cultures and your race that you should be incredibly proud to own up to. And soon, you will realize that these values so uniquely created by your culture really also exist in other cultures as well. Barack Obama is the President of the United Sates. But he is also a citizen of the world.

The values I have learned growing up in that tiny Chinese city surrounded by that large group of caring families forever defined who I am. I no longer have to feel genuine enough to claim to be a citizen of China, a resident of New York, a alumni from a great Public University to feel like I am being defined. I carry the values I have gathered with me everywhere I go, and those values, not my color or gender, define my identity.

I reject Miss Universe’s definition of “Citizen of the World.” Citizen of the world does not mean you feel like you belong everywhere. That is impossible and quite disorienting. To become a citizen of the world, you have to first understand what you have learned from your unique background and cultural upbringing, and next transfer your experiences into values you can share with others, anyone around the world.

And thus, I am a Chinese living in America and an Americanized Chinese – and just like Obama and others out there who share our values of respect and curiosity and freedom of expression – we are citizens of the world.

Opinion on China, Part I.

Back Then:

In Middle School the only thing people ever asked me about China is whether or not I eat puppies and kittens. I tried to explain only Southern Chinese eat dogs. Nobody believed me, or cared about the difference.

Then the millennium arrived and China went from being a joke to being a threat. Interests over China started to boil and people went from saying “I pity your sufferings under a Communist regime” to “I envy your ability to speak the language of billions of people (more importantly, trillions of dollars).”

In June of 2001, CNN held a discussion on the fifth anniversary of 6/4/1989. Wei Jingsheng declared on Larry King that the Chinese government will one day screw up so badly that the revolution will revive itself. Not to say that day will never come, but it was suppose to come sooner, definitely sooner than 2009.

Now:

Seven years later in August of 2008, the world’s media began the broadcast of Beijing Olympics in horror of not able to find anything significantly wrong with a city everybody came to find faults on. My coworkers in New York would not shut up about the suppression of human rights and China’s surveillance on its own people. Neither facts I deny.

I am all about human rights. But I hate arrogant white people (and Asians and Blacks and Browns I suppose too) who knew nothing about China except coverage from CNN and proceed to argue with me because I am Chinese and they want to show me off about their vast knowledge and certainty regarding democracy over oppression. Go read a book on China written by a real scholar, go live in a Communist country to understand what Communism is all about. I don’t think you know anything about democracy until the day you lose it. I really do believe that.

Trying to constantly “show” me China’s oppression on human rights really do nothing to improve anybody’s situation, and at its deepest level just reveals American’s inability to digest the FACT that a Communist country is turning somewhat cool.  Which, really, is all just flair.

I have no time to comfort their feel-good ego and seriously, these attempts (mostly from male coworkers) are just not necessary.

Athletes came into Beijing wearing masks in fear of the smogs that are sure to clog their lungs. In the end, nothing like that ever occurred. In fact, the Olympics was so drama-free that it disappointed many who expected much worse embarrassments than just some gymnastic girls lying about their age. It also didn’t help that this Communist regime that is (at least temporarily) backed up by its people showed the kind of responsiveness toward a major earthquake disaster that would put the democratic US government’s response to Katrina to deep shame.

My Perception:

My perception is that the core of China really hasn’t changed since 1989 – its goal back then and its goal right now have always been economic development. But American’s perception toward China has gone from passive ignorance to undisclosed envy and I’m afraid, to a kind of hatred rooted in none other than xenophobia.

China is simply a country whose people’s lives have improved, and for some still improving.

The suggestion by many American politicians that China’s improvement is at the expense of American lives is simply, economically ungrounded. Anyone with a simple introduction to Political Economy would know that a country cannot “manipulate” its currency for its own benefits forever without seriously hurting its own citizens – so the currency manipulation accusation about China is as legit as the immigrant accusation that American values are being threatened by “outsiders.” Both accusations expose fear and insecurities against something unknown and foreign. Instead of trying to face each other and understand each other, Americans box themselves up and cry that they want equality – equality from what?

In Conclusion:

I think many things are wrong with China. Internal unfairness against migrant workers is taking over economic progress, which means 2 billion Chinese workers will be out of jobs this year while the rich keeps on getting richer (this further slashes American’s claims that their job losses are all going over to China.)

I think education and creativity are being restricted. I think citizens are discouraged from helping each other. I think migrant workers (and their children) are going psychologically insane over the impossible conditions they find themselves in order to just survive.

But I don’t think China is in any shape or form exploiting America. Quite on the contrary.